Abstract
Nostalgia is the desire for what is currently unattainable in a past place or time and manifests itself as an emotional and cultural response to the loss or remoteness of something that has been considered valuable or significant. Coined ex novo from the union of two Greek locutions (νόστος nostos: return, home and ἄλγος algos: pain), the term nostalgia was used for the first time by the Alsatian physician Hofer in 1688 to designate a "new" modern pathology that caused deep states of sadness generated "by the ardent desire to return to one's homeland" (Hofer in Prete, 2018, p. 37). In its original meaning, the nostos manifests itself as a condition of disorientation that emphasizes distance and space and that determines the algos, a deep and painful vague de l'âme. Only later, thanks to the use that poets and philosophers will make of it, will it abandon the medical status to reach that of feeling, moving from the desire for a distant place to that of a past or never lived time. In this way, as Svetlana Boym has argued, nostalgia is the "longing for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams" (Boym, 2015, p. 16). Whether it is a spatial or temporal elsewhere, the pain for the impossibility of the longed-for return is as strong in the unsatisfactory present as it is a sweet alibi for dreaming of the past. "The nostalgic lives two lives," says Jankélévitch, the first of the everyday and the second of the "Atmospheric and vaporous Elsewhere" (Jankélévitch, 2017, p. 346).The contemporary imagination, understood as that magma from which symbolic and ritual practices germinate and take root, seems to be deeply linked to ambivalent nostalgic feelings that oscillate between the desire to recover an idealized past and the awareness of its inaccessibility. The second life of the nostalgic is ghostly, and the elsewhere is imagined and imaginary, a "chimerical horizon" (Ibid., 2017, p. 349). For Hofer, the fixed idea that invades the body and soul of the nostalgic comes from a distorted imagination that produces phantasmata.The emerging structure of contemporary nostalgia retains this archaic aspect of phantasmagoria and reenchantment. Our imagination has become an ideal junk shop. The ubiquity and pervasiveness of the past, mainly due to new digital technologies, as well as the commercial use of nostalgia in the aesthetic form of retro, cause and determine the virality of nostalgic sentiment in the current era. The past, in the form of images, artifacts and memories, is everywhere, surrounds us, absorbs us, and determines our daily imagination both individual and collective.This Call for Paper proposes to reflect on the imaginary of nostalgia and the different meanings that they take on in the current era. At the basis of its development there are multiple factors, such as social, cultural or personal changes that create a sense of discontinuity, disorientation or alienation (Davis, 2023). Nostalgia, in fact, informs us much more about the present than about the past. It can be seen as a thermometer that measures the emotional temperature of a society. If there is an epidemic of sentiment underway, as argued by Svetlana Boym (2001), the concept of stimmung by Martin Heidegger (2006) echoes in its viral spread. Nostalgia would become a vision of the world, the Zeitgeist that defines the mood and atmosphere of an era. Like the sociologist Fred Davis in 1979, we will be led to ask: "why so much nostalgia now?"